Denis Cuspert

Denis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert (18 October 1975-), also called Deso Dogg, was a German rapper who converted to radical Islam and fought with Junud al-Sham and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in the Syrian Civil War.

Biography
Denis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert was born on 18 October 1975 in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, West Germany to a father from Ghana and a mother from Germany. His father abandoned the family when he was young, and his mother remarried to an African-American soldier in the US Army, a man that Cuspert was in conflict with. He was a criminal in his young days, serving time in jail on many occasions. In 2002, he became a rapper under the name of "Deso Dogg", but in 2010 he converted to Islam after a near-death experience in a car crash. He became a radical, and he took on the name "Abou Maleeq" as his new name. Cuspert became a nasheed singer and declared his support for Mujahideen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Chechnya, and he described Berlin as a metropolis of infidels. Despite being on a watchlist, Cuspert travelled to Egypt in hopes of setting up a German salafist colony, but he later received weapons training there and in Libya before heading to Syria to fight in the Syrian Civil War.

Using the nickname "Abu Talha al-Almani", he fought alongside Junud al-Sham by August 2013 and in September he was wounded in an airstrike. By the end of 2013, he left Junud al-Sham to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and he fought at the First Battle of the Shaer Gas Field in July 2014. On 20 April 2014 another Abu Talha al-Almani was killed in an al-Nusra Front suicide bombing against ISIS, but other foreign fighters denied Cuspert's death.